Today at Live Action, I have a response to recent comments by Gloria Steinem at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser, the first of which was:

“Why is it that the same people who are against birth control and abortion are also against sex between two women or two men?” Steinem asked her audience, reports the Memphis Flyer. She continued that those people “are against any sex that cannot end in reproduction.”

Unfortunately, an editorial judgment was made to cut out part of my response, so I am presenting an expanded version of the rest here, where hopefully it will help equip pro-lifers to deal with this line of pro-abortion attack.

How does this strawman complaint fail? Let us count the ways. First, plenty of people—and not just pro-lifers—have acknowledged that antipathy toward abortion doesn’t automatically correlate with views commonly maligned as “anti-gay,” as evidenced by polling that indicates public opinion simultaneously becoming more accepting of homosexuality and same-sex marriage yet unchanged or less accepting of abortion.

Gee, it’s almost as if abortion and same-sex marriage are two different issues with distinct pros and cons that can be evaluated separately! Yes, most pro-lifers are also conservatives and/or Christians, but there are plenty of other pro-lifers all over the religious or ideological spectrums. There are even pro-lifers who are gay themselves, so good luck trying to use this argument on them, Gloria.

Second, it is true that conservatives (religious and secular alike) tend to oppose both abortion and the redefinition of marriage. For some people that’s may be because the Bible frowns on both; but for the most part it’s because both violate the Founding principles which conservatism exists to conserve: the right to life, and marriage’s function as a societal building block.

But by framing it as being “against sex between two women or two men,” Steinem gives the slanderous impression that we would take control of their private lives and punish them for what they do in their bedrooms, which couldn’t be further from the truth. There is no real movement in the United States to criminalize gay sex, relationships, cohabitation, etc. The only real gay debates going on today are civil recognition of same-sex marriage, which is entirely separate from the question of tangible benefits, and Steinem’s allies attempting to force private citizens—under penalty of law—to participate in ceremonies that violate their convictions.

Finally, endlessly repeating the clichéd “controlling sex is pro-lifers’ secret ulterior motive” conspiracy theory won’t change the fact that our stated reason for opposing abortion—it kills innocent people—is scientifically, objectively, irrefutably, obviously true. Anybody claiming not to understand that recoiling at violence against children is one of the average person’s most basic human intuitions—which anyone who dismisses this obvious motivation to oppose abortion is doing—is lying.

These days, there seems to be an increasingly-vocal minority of pro-lifers who don’t recognize that the abortion lobby and the radical gay lobby are two factions of a common agenda. But while their friendship and support in protecting the preborn is valuable, all pro-lifers should be able to see through Steinem’s attempt to smear our movement with these falsehoods.

In a rare, refreshing instance of someone other than the pro-life blogosphere telling pro-abortion extremists to grow up, Kyle Lorey has a column at Odyssey this week making the case that abortion defenders should stop calling pro-lifers “anti-choice.”

After explaining his decision to not state his own position on abortion in hopes of keeping readers on either side from reading his critique through a predetermined lense, Lorey writes that the label needlessly gets in the way of having productive conversations about abortion and potentially finding areas of compromise…

If the left wishes to advance their cause, they needn’t focus on overturning the entire moral viewpoint of pro-lifers—such an approach is doomed to failure. Instead, they should focus on the nitty-gritty; this allows the debate to focus on specifics and pragmatics as opposed to sweeping generalities about the inherent immorality of the opposing side. If both sides can forget those huge differences, real discourse about state and federal policy can be achieved. Toward this end, divisive rhetorical tools should be curtailed—including the terming of pro-lifers “anti-choice.” If a Republican who wished to compromise with the Democrats referred to them as “communist swine” while discussing policy with them, everyone would be much less willing to even begin to engage.

Just days after unsuccessfully arguing that banning abortion with rape and health exceptions is still too extreme, Vox has a new video that purports to debunk the “biggest myth about abortion you probably think is true.” Unfortunately, being Vox, all the video ends up doing is reinforcing myths.

The video’s narrator, Liz Plank, demonstrates that those who “feel passionate about abortion” “don’t know much about it” by interviewing pro-life protestors outside the Supreme Court.

There’s been a lot of talk about abortion exceptions lately, mostly in the form of abortion defenders brainstorming to figure out the best ways to turn them against pro-lifers.

Usually it’s as simple as “they oppose any exceptions because they’re extremists who don’t care about women,” but they also have a backup narrative. At Vox, Emily Crockett attempts to argue that instead of concessions pro-life politicians have made to pro-abortion fears, for which pro-choicers should be grateful and reciprocate with concessions of their own, “these exceptions are actually a major human rights problem.”

Give pro-aborts an inch, and they’ll bludgeon you with it for the rest of your days…

Last week we covered Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards’s condescending non-answers to pro-life students attending her speech at Georgetown University, but it turns out that wasn’t even the most outrageous highlight of the event. No, that would be the part of her speech when she said:

Our history with race in America is something that we all have to address, including Planned Parenthood. It’s important that we understand our collective history and the legacy that it leaves on those that are still living in an unjust system. Lack of access to healthcare and reproductive rights is a result of many factors—race, gender, sexual orientation, geography and immigration status. In order to build true equity in America we have to address it all.

Yes, that’s the president of the country’s largest killer of minority children comparing her side to the fight against racism.

Without accurate facts and superior reasoning to vindicate their position, the pro-abortion media often finds itself having to scrape the bottom of the barrel for morale boosts.

On Friday, Raw Story’s Tom Boggioni provided a golden example of the phenomenon by gushing over how “awesome” it was to read a Portland, Oregon Planned Parenthood employee known only as Damien “smack down” pro-lifers in a Tumblr post (Tumblr sign-up required to read) and follow-up to critics supposedly illustrating the critical importance of the abortion giant’s work.

If you actually believe abortion is legal mass murder on par with the Holocaust, then how is it 100% wrong to kill abortion providers? Answer: most prolifers don’t even believe their own claims and don’t think abortion is quite the same as murder. Because it’s not.

This pops up every now and then among abortion defenders trying to trip up pro-lifers on our own principles. Slate’s Will Saletan accused pro-lifers who condemned the slaying of George Tiller of not “mean[ing] it literally” when we call abortion murder. Evangelical pastor-turned-humanist/atheist Bruce Gerencser asks “those who say abortion is murder” if “you support the execution of murderers.” Jason Brennan of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog thinks it’s “implausible” and “absurd” for people who equate abortion with murder to confine themselves to stopping it through legal and peaceful means. California law blogger Mike Cernovich argues that peaceful pro-lifers are suffering cognitive dissonance, basing our beliefs “on psychological comfort rather than intellectual rigor.” We see it on a fairly regular basis in comment threads.

The truth is that this isn’t a sincere argument. They know they can’t win a fair argument on whether the unborn are human or abortion is killing, so they hope to indirectly discredit the truth by conjuring up inane reasons to claim we don’t believe it. So now would be a good time for a refresher course on the just use of force in a free society.

The views expressed on Conservative Standards are strictly my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of any other organizations or publications where I have been employed and/or my work has been featured, nor do they necessarily reflect the views of any individuals employed by or otherwise affiliated with such groups.